Whiterun Marketplace

Various meshes for Whiterun Market. A variety of central wells to choose from, improved vendor stalls, water ladders and gates, and more

This mod provides new meshes for the Whiterun Market.

It is created in a modular way and ready to use. This means that the following four steps are all optional and are only presented in actual order (from hub to external market assets) to reflect the evolution of the mod. But you can install any or all of them in any order, obviously some of them will overwrite each other (eg: "well"/first step option)

In the first step, you have different options for the main terrain mesh and its center well:

-Default file: Detailed version of Vanilla Well. Less harsh angles, improved UVs, mesh fixing and more.

• Option 'GroundWell': less noticeable ground that allows the character to cross over without problems. A "grid" of wells similar to some historic castles.
• Option "Nowell": just the central platform, no different from the one in Wind District. Only slightly detailed.

-The coverage is good, the diameter is slightly reduced, and there are no large platforms, so the market looks a bit large (in my opinion). The cover mimics the market to suit the Whiterun style.

The last three options may be particularly useful for modifiers who wish to have more space at this location.

Secondly (starting with Update3+), you can also pick my grids for vendor booths.

It's been reshaped again with slightly more shape detail and better polygon management. They have no performance issues as they actually have a smaller memory footprint and total vertex count compared to the original assets. The latter just suffered from the usual large number of duplicate vertices, unnecessary UV seam splitting, etc., which have been corrected.

In fact, I personally consider them "patches" (they contain similar UV fixes to USLEEP, so yes, you can override them in NMM/MO).

Another notable change is that they now provide storage space under their main table. Modifiers can add interesting stuff, goods, money, etc. to it.

Also included are two vendor booths, one short with different cover supports and a long corner booth with added storage space at the other end. They are obviously being shared as modder resources, although they may eventually be added to the marketplace at a later date when I release my first .esp.

Third (as of Update4+), you may also consider using another mesh as an alternative to Whiterun's Double Dragon Totem.

In Vanilla, this asset is used in town at least 3 times, with many more variations. In addition to the regular grid corrections, I decided to make the stone base thinner for my liking - it now (usually) crushes less on the stair curbs. It also corrects the messy vertex normals of the vanilla asset to better fit the vanilla baked normal map, making it more faithful to the original Zbrush sculpt. So don't edit its normals in nifskope or you will destroy the piece.

The fourth one (as of Update5+), is a mesh replacement for wrstairswater01.nif. Gates, stairs and canals flow from the cloud area into the market.

With about 150% of the vanilla memory footprint, it's still performance friendly. I've done enough testing, and some on "very good" PCs, to verify this. Main features are: better UV, taller towers, small bones and no stuck stair collisions (compared to vanilla). The ground section also provides more space for vendors' stalls - which was the original motivation for recreating this property (and then, one thing led to another...).

One other (and only one) change I might make would be to rebuild the top of the tower, with some less "slim" pylons, and some reasonable styling differences... but that would require .esp to move some of the nearby stuff around a bit. We’ll see).

A note of caution: so far it's the only asset in this mod that isn't compatible with OpenCities (according to my testing); I'll need to think about that carefully. Update v1.55 provides an OCS-compatible file (AmberStairsWater_4OCS_1 …